Adaptive Anonymous Authentication for Wearable Sensors in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are perceived as an emerging key technology for the next generation ubiquitous healthcare systems. However, the openness and mobility of wireless sensor technologies make the sensor-controller communication vulnerable to be eavesdropped and linked to the sensors in transmission of patient’s information. Furthermore, in such resource-constrained environment, authenticating sensor nodes anonymously with the controller node while considering their limited capabilities is a paramount security requirement. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and adaptive anonymous authentication and key agreement scheme for the two-tier WBAN. The proposed protocol enables an anonymous mutual authentication and a session key establishment between the controller node and the body sensor nodes while taking into account the dynamic context changes. From a security perspective, we demonstrate that the proposed key agreement scheme achieves the desired security properties such as anonymity, unlinkability, perfect forward secrecy, etc. Performance analysis proves that the proposed protocol outperforms benchmark schemes in terms of communication and computational overhead.